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Chris Weidner on Kalymnos: An island where climbers turn rocks into gold

By Chris Weidner, For the Camera

Posted:
11/19/2013 03:49:14 PM MST

Updated:
11/19/2013 03:52:46 PM MST

Bruce Miller, of Boulder, tufa wrestling on the Grande Grotta classic, Aegialis (5.12d), with Telendos in the background. Masouri is just visible in the lower left-hand corner.
(Photo by Chris Weidner)

It's one of the last evenings of the season at Noufaro, a Greek restaurant in the small village of Masouri, on the island of Kalymnos.

I'm eating moussaka and a Kalymnian salad with my wife, Heather, and our friends from Boulder, Heidi Wirtz, Bruce Miller and his daughter Uli. Our server is a friendly, older woman who owns this restaurant with her husband.

"Efkarist," she says, smiling. "Thank you for coming to Kalymnos."

We tell her it's like paradise here. She laughs and says that she's lived here her entire life, yet it still feels like she has just arrived. With no other customers to attend to, she explains that Greeks on the other Dodecanese Islands (of which 26 are inhabited) used to make fun of Kalymnos, saying all it had was rocks.

"Now," she says, "because of climbers like you, our rocks are like gold."

Indeed, the financial benefit of being a world-renowned climbing destination is palpable to Kalymnians, especially in the face of the 4-year-old government-debt crisis in Greece. Kalymnos is now much better off economically than the other islands. While the unemployment rate in Greece reached a peak of nearly 28 percent last June, businesses in Masouri enjoyed their most lucrative summer to date.

And from a climber's perspective, that's not surprising.

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Looking west from the deck of our apartment above Masouri, the azure waters of the Aegean Sea fade into the horizon. The neighboring island of Telendos juts from the sea like a rocky volcano, adding drama to the already-spectacular scene. White studios line the coast, stacked on top of each other like blocky Legos, staggered so that each one has a deck with a seaside view. Just a 15-minute walk from the myriad shops, cafés and bakeries, the famous cliffs of gray and orange limestone rise above town.

Chris Weidner
(
PAUL AIKEN
)

The Grande Grotta is the most celebrated of the 50-odd cliffs on the island. It's a vast cave, 200 feet tall and dripping with countless tufas (climber-speak for stalactites) that look like limestone icicles. Some tufas are little more than curious blobs of texture, smaller than a fist and somehow attached to the wall. Others are so large that savvy climbers can cop no-hands rests in the middle of the Grande Grotta by straddling, leg-wrapping or even bear-hugging them.

Tufas are ridiculously fun to climb, and nowhere else in the world do they seem to form like they do in Kalymnos. That's just one reason why more and more climbers are flocking to this idyllic Greek island every season.

Last Friday, a grocery store owner in Masouri named Antonio ("Call me Tony," he said with a heavy Greek accent) explained why he thinks the Golden Age of Kalymnos is upon us. As we stuffed our backpacks with fresh bread, olive oil and local honey, he told us that before climbers arrived en masse around the turn of the millennium, Kalymnos resembled a ghost town half the year. It was bad for business. Now, because of the climbers, the off-season lasts only two months, and summers are hectic but profitable.

"But it will not last," he warned. As climbers descend upon the island in greater numbers, Tony said that more restaurants, hotels and tourism will eventually strip Kalymnos of its special, neighborly feel.

For now, the majority of Kalymnians seem as thankful for the climbers as we are for their rocks. I just hope that climbers around the world will prioritize respect for the people and landscape here, perpetuating the symbiosis that has, in a sense, turned those rocks into gold.

"Right now," said Tony, "Kalymnos has just what you need; nothing more. Please, enjoy!"

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